Search form

Although mobile devices are generating a rapidly increasing proportion of search queries, search interfaces have not changed significantly to accommodate mobile constraints. In particular, imprecise search exists in the no-man’s land between specific fact-finding and general browsing, and can be especially challenging on mobile devices, when user input is difficult and environmental distractions make remembering related information difficult. We examined the prevalence of these mobile search use cases in a two-week diary study, finding that imprecise and general search accounted for the large majority of difficulty with search. Hypothesizing that the ability to view a link neighborhood around the search result could be quite helpful in these cases, we designed GraphTiles, a visual interface for mobile search that exploits the structured entity relationships present in a significant portion of online datasets (e.g. IMDb and LinkedIn). In an experimental evaluation, users performed imprecise searches more quickly with GraphTiles than with a standard mobile site.